Help & FAQ

Novelists working on long, multi-thread books. Series and trilogy authors. Worldbuilders with a sprawling cast and a long memory of details to keep consistent. Research-heavy non-fiction and academic writers who need structure, citations, and references. If your project is more than a single document and bigger than a short story, you'll feel the benefit.

If you're writing a short story, a single blog post, or notes for yourself — SceneWeaver isn't the right tool. Reach for a plain text editor or a notes app instead.

No. SceneWeaver runs entirely on your machine. There's no account to create, nothing to sign into, and no cloud connection in the writing path. You can use it on a plane, in a cabin, anywhere — and your manuscripts are exactly where they were when you next open the app.

On first launch you'll see a selection dialog with a New Manuscript button. Click it, give your project a name, and SceneWeaver creates a fresh manuscript file with an empty chapter ready for you. From then on, the app remembers your last-open manuscript and reopens it automatically.

Yes — SceneWeaver ships with two sample manuscripts, a fiction project and an academic project. They're a fast way to see the structure, entities, reports, and exports in action without starting from scratch.

SceneWeaver shows your manuscript as a tree on the left of the window. Right-click any node to add a child chapter or scene; drag-and-drop to reorder. A scene that's grown too long can be split into sections without losing its place in the tree, and word counts roll up automatically from each scene to its chapter and to the whole manuscript.

Yes — turn on Typewriter Mode. The line your cursor is on locks to the middle of the screen so your eyes don't have to chase the page as it scrolls. Switch it off when you want the normal scrolling view back.

Yes. SceneWeaver supports splitting a scene at the cursor — either into two siblings or into a parent with children — without losing formatting. You can also pull child sections back into their parent (rollup) when a scene has matured and no longer needs subdivisions.

Add them as Character entities — proper records with name, description, and whatever notes you want. SceneWeaver then tracks every place they appear across the manuscript, shows you that list on demand, and helps you rename them everywhere at once if you change your mind.

Same treatment. Items, Locations, and Organisations are first-class entities, with usage tracking, detail views, and full participation in the reports system. If your story has a cursed sword that needs to behave consistently in chapters four, eleven, and twenty-three, SceneWeaver helps you make sure it does.

Statistics & Readability, Sentence Breakdown, Repeated Phrases, Entity Usage, Data Quality & Completeness, and the Writing Coach dashboard. Each one answers a different question — "how does this scene read?", "am I overusing 'turned and said'?", "is my main character actually appearing as a main character?" — and most can be filtered to a single scene, a chapter, or the whole manuscript.

Yes. Search runs across every scene; Replace works the same way. If you've used proper entities for a character or location, renaming the entity is even cleaner — the change propagates everywhere it's referenced.

On your hard drive, as a single SQLite file per manuscript. You choose where. SceneWeaver doesn't upload it anywhere, doesn't index it on a server, and doesn't need an internet connection to read or write it.

Yes. Copy the manuscript file — that's the whole project — onto a USB stick, into your cloud-sync folder, or by email to yourself. On the other machine, open it from SceneWeaver and keep writing.

Restore Points are named snapshots you take before any change you're not sure about. They survive app restarts. The Snapshot Diff Viewer shows exactly what changed between two restore points, so rolling back isn't a leap of faith.

File → Export. Choose your format — DOCX, PDF, EPUB, HTML, Markdown, plain text, Fountain, or LaTeX — and pick which chapters to include. Save the combination as a Compile Preset and you can re-run that exact export with one click next time.

No. Your manuscript content stays on your disk — prose, entity names, citations, annotations, exports — none of it is transmitted, ever. That promise is unconditional.

SceneWeaver also offers two opt-in feedback channels — bug reports and anonymous usage telemetry — both off by default. Neither of them ever includes a word you wrote. If you choose to enable them, you're helping us see which features are working and which aren't; if you don't, nothing leaves your machine. This is the exchange behind SceneWeaver being free: optional feedback in return for a free tool.

For the full data-handling detail — what this website collects, what the app's opt-in channels collect, who processes it, how long it's kept, and your rights — see the Privacy Notice.

Version 1 is free for everyone. The complete feature set, no accounts, no activation, no paywall, no watermarks on exports. Bug fixes ship as free updates.

Version 2, when it arrives, will introduce optional paid tiers (Student and Pro) for writers who need unlimited simultaneous manuscripts. A free tier continues in version 2 — the same complete feature set, capped at three simultaneous manuscripts. Version 1 users may also stay on version 1 forever and never pay.

SceneWeaver runs on Linux (its primary target — tested on Ubuntu and Fedora derivatives), Windows 10/11, and macOS 12+. Compiled installers for all three are available on the Download page.

Yes — SceneWeaver imports from DOCX, preserving paragraph alignment, soft line-breaks, and chapter structure. More import formats are on the roadmap, but DOCX covers the most common starting point.